Hope for Kids Food Diaper + Food Drives
Aside from all the work we’ve been doing on raising awareness at Hope for Kids, we also wanted to make sure that we in some way directly helped out with our long time partner, the CCC Cancer House in Maharagama. Although we were not allowed to physically meet the kids at the home, we wanted to make sure they were comfortable during their stay at the home during the pandemic as majority of the families were not permitted to leave the premises out of fear for contamination. So, we decided to host 2 drives. One, a diaper drive for the younger children and two, a food drive! The diaper drive was conducted during the duration of the time when we were still online schooling, which meant that we simply put out notices on social media and asked for the diaper contributions to be left at the school for collection. However, when we did actually return to school in person, our efforts were nearly tripled in order to carry out a successful food drive!
We began by splitting into groups to get the logistics in order at first. My group was in charge of creating the posters for the food drive on Canva, which also meant that we needed to decided which grade was bringing in which foods. Naturally this was somewhat difficult as we had to figure out which grade to assign each item to and we had to decide on what rations were most needed. In the end we ended up deciding on items ranging from oil to rice, tea leaves and dhal among other basic supplies after which, myself and a few others stayed behind to go around the school in order to post a few flyers and posters out in a place where they would be visible. During these few sessions we also took some time to write to the school newsletter in order to enquire about the possibility of us announcing it on the daily bulletin which worked out in our favor. I was genuinely impressed with our work ethic because we happened to be one of the only still functioning services at the school at the time.
After a few months came time for collecting the rations. I spent multiple breaks, lunches and minutes after school making trips around both the primary and secondary campuses to collect what the students, parents and teachers had brought in. I am happy to say that we were very pleasantly surprised at how much of a turnout there was despite us having just returned to school. So with that we ended up carrying our new supplies all the way back into the sports department to sort our donations out. We sorted, piled, stacked and labelled endlessly till our work was finally done, just in time for us to bid farewell to our seniors as well which was a rather bittersweet in hindsight.
Needless to say it felt like a job well done and I am personally extremely proud of us for overcoming so much and pushing to our maximum capacity during this time. I have to say in my 2 years in this service this was honestly one of the most rewarding efforts we’ve participated in, and although we don’t get the chance of meeting our friends at the home, there is still a heartfelt sense of accomplishment in knowing that what we did will be making significant changes for these families in time to come.
Like Joseph Kennedy once said,
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
^ Putting up the posters around the primary and secondary buildings
^ Our final food drive poster!
^Last day of sorting the rations we received :))